Cottagecore

William Morris design for "Trellis" wallpaper, 1862 in Arts and Crafts movement style

While cottagecore arose as a named aesthetic in 2018, similar aesthetics and ideals have a long cultural history. The ancient Greeks had seen the geographical Arcadia as a savage and inhospitable place but as the drawbacks of urban habitation became increasingly obvious they came to see an idealised Arcadia as a representation of an untainted rural life and spiritual haven. The poet Theocritus wrote poems about shepherds and shepherdesses in the 3rd century BCE, leading to him being often cited as the inventor of pastoral poetry. [9] The market for Theocritus’ work was primarily the educated urban class of Alexandria, seeking an escape from the filth, crowding and disease of city life. In the 1st century BCE the Roman poet Virgil’s pastoral poetry was written in response to the violence and chaos of war. However he expanded the genre by acknowledging contemporary moral and political issues such as war whilst maintaining a distance through the pastoral trope.[9] Pastoral escapism continued to be produced for the courtly audience of the Roman Empire in the formal of novels such as the 2nd century CE Daphnis and Chloe.[9]

Pastoral escapism returned as a theme of the arts during the renaissance through the 14th century Italian poet Petrarch who was known for his hillwalking and gardening as well as his poetry. [9] In Elizabethan England Shakespeare wrote two pastoral plays, As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale. They reflect the inherent tension between the subject of the pastoral theme compared with its intended audience in that although aristocrats are featured in these works as play-acting shepherds and falling in love with shepherdesses marriage only takes place only when it is revealed that both are of high social status.[9] Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe’s renowned poem The Passionate Shepherd to His Love inspired poetic responses from poets such as John Donne and Dorothy Parker with Walter Raleigh’s response from the beloved being to point out that Arcadian ideas were fallacies.[9]

The Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century was an approach to art, architecture, and design that embraced 'folk' styles and techniques as a critique of industrial production.[5]

A 2020 New York Times article compared cottagecore to the social simulation video game series Animal Crossing being acted out in real life.[4][5]

Cottagecore has become a subculture of the LGBT and particularly the lesbian and female bisexual community, stemming from the drive for an escape from heteronormative society. Cottagecore videos of LGBT women performing tasks like baking bread, embroidering, and thrifting to calming music have gone viral on social media app TikTok. Some proponents of cottagecore report wishing to reclaim non-sexual ideas and images of intimacy and togetherness – as one Reddit user explains, "cottagecore sees love as a connection between two souls."[10]

Others see cottagecore as a way to disentangle and reclaim traditional rural pleasures and surroundings from the homophobia and transphobia they experienced growing up in small towns. One cottagecore fan told i-D magazine, "Even now when I go back [to my hometown] I can't help but feel watched and judged all the time for how I look or dress. It especially makes me feel like the things I loved in childhood, like having farm animals and picking blackberries in the fields and getting lost in the woods, are cis- and hetero-coded. So for me, cottagecore is an ideal where I can be visibly queer in rural spaces."[10]

Cottagecore has been criticised as perpetuating colonialist values, as it "romanticizes the legacy of settler colonialism and frontier living that relies on the stolen land of indigenous people."

Pointing to the gendered dimension of the investment in cottagecore, Claire Ollivain wrote in Honi Soit, a student newspaper at the University of Sydney: "While cottagecore conflicts with these masculine, patriotic myths by providing a fantasy of women and queer people in rural space, it is nevertheless a projection of the urban and carries with it the colonial assumption that land is up for grabs."[11]

Writers have commented on the contrasts between idyllic online depictions of cottagecore, and some other realities of rural life with bugs, smells, dirt, and feces.[4]

Some Gen Z political activists view cottagecore as an opportunity to campaign about such issues as global warming.[12]

• Agrarianism
• Agriculturalism
• Arcadia (utopia)
• Ecofeminism
• Pastoral
• Dark academia